Friday, December 14, 2012

Q-and-A with David Mogolov

David Mogolov from mogolov.com

I caught David Mogolov's show Dumber Fasterat the New York International Fringe Festival last August. He and I were performing in the same venue. His show was funny, thoughtful and performed at a breakneck velocity. His presentation style echoes the Spaulding Gray/Mike Daisey approach (addressing the audience directly, as an audience, from behind a desk), but Mogolov definitely carves out his own idiosyncratic style. He is personable, professional and super-smart, but somehow is careful not to create the holier-than-thou distancing that can sometimes plague solo performers of the desk-and-talk style. He holds the subject he is exploring up and invites the audience to say "hey, you guys, just look at this..." right alongside him.

He recently agreed to be interviewed for TheSoloPerformer.com, and I'm so glad he did.Q: Please give us a brief bio, where you are from and how you started in theatre/performance?

A: I'm
from Iowa, but was raised largely in Kansas, and then I moved to Boston
for college and never left town. Though I did a tiny bit of theater in
high school, most of my stage time back then was as a particularly
untalented musician. I was in a band that wasn't very good but had
schtick that went up to 11. So when college ended and a friend of mine
recommended that I audition for a play, I wasn't really scared of the
stage, and I was too ignorant of theater to know how much I didn't know.
At his recommendation, I auditioned for a production of As Bees In Honey Drown,
and got cast. The production was in many respects a fiasco (I surely
bear a big load of the blame), but we had a really great pair of leads,
and it's also where I met a fellow cast member, Steve Kleinedler, who
subsequently became one of my closest friends.That
was in the spring of 2001. That Thanksgiving, I had this truly bizarre
odyssey home to Boston from visiting relatives in Virginia, and I kept
telling the story to friends, and obsessing over it, until one night my
friend Zabeth, who was at that time booking a new comedy night at
ImprovBoston, said, "You should tell this story on stage." To which I
said, "People do that?" I needed a director, so I called Steve. The
show, One Night at T.F. Green, got good audiences, a fortuitous
little bit of press, and a second run. 11 years later, Steve and I still
work together on every show, and I think I finally know what I'm doing.
He's directed 5 of my solo shows, a dueling-monologue show with Sara
Faith Alterman, and we wrote, produced, and performed more sketch comedy
than seems plausible, on reflection.

Q: What event or desire brought you specifically into the world of solo performance?A: My dad, my brothers, and I watched pretty much every stand up comedy
special that aired on TV between 1986 and 1996. To me, it was the
single greatest thing a person could do, but I have to admit it never
crossed my mind to do it. Although I heard and understood the "you can
be anything you want" messages as a child, I don't think I internalized
them until I hit 30 or so, by which time we usually figure out it's too
late. But yeah, at the core of what I do is that childhood and teenage
adoration of stand up comedy. Particularly George Carlin. And a solo
show by Steven Banks called "Home Entertainment System" which, if there
were any justice in this world, would be an enormous hit that everybody
knows.

Q: Could you tell us about some of your solo work?A: Well, the first show, One Night at T.F. Green,
was a mostly-true account of my night at the airport in Warwick, Rhode
Island. I attempted to tell the story close to accurately, both in
storytelling and through playing many of the people I met. Though I
think it was a good show, and the audiences really liked it, it was also
a huge opportunity for me to make some mistakes that I could learn
from. Each show since has gotten better, and with the last two, There Is No Good News and Dumber Faster, I've found a style that seems to suit me.

Q: How would you describe your particular kind of solo performance?

A: I
sometimes think of it as theatrical comedic essay. The best essays end
up in places their sources don't obviously point to, and reading them is
constantly surprising, but on reflection, it's all completely logical.
That's what I try to do with my shows. I want to take the audience from a
set of basic claims and observations to a place that is undeniably true
but totally unexpected. So I start quietly, telling stories and talking
about current events and psychology and economics, and I throw out more
and more and more until it's a big interconnected mess, and then I pull
it all together, because I honestly hate messes. I try to layer in the
joke density of stand up comedy, so that all the way through the
audience is laughing.

Q: What is your favorite thing about doing this work?

A: The
first laugh of the show. That's my absolute favorite thing. It should
arrive at a particular moment, and when it does, it's just fantastic.
Nothing compares. Then I can stop worrying and lose myself in the show.

Q: What inspires you to keep going and how do you keep yourself motivated?

A: Motivation
is hard. I'm a procrastinator, but one wracked by guilt. I wish I could
procrastinate without dread. As a practical matter, I motivate myself
by setting deadlines and making them public. Even if nobody's really
watching, announcing that I'll have a first draft by New Year's forces
me to do it. The only thing that overpowers my laziness is my shame. So I
have to do it.As for inspiration, I guess there comes a point between shows where
I've been reading, and listening to the radio, and hearing friends talk,
and my brain catches on a little wrinkle, a bit of cognitive dissonance
or a little warp in the logic of the universe that I keep coming back
to. With There Is No Good News,
it was this financial crisis that exposed deeper problems with how we
live than we were acknowledging even in the depth of it. With Dumber Faster,
it was the double life we live, the public and private selves, the way
we're not acting in our own interest, and doing it so publicly. I get
hooked on some idea, and I can't stop poking at it, and at some point I
consciously realize that I've already got the core of a show. So then I
set that public deadline.

Q: What is your approach to the development process when
putting together a new project? Do you create a lot on stage,
improvising? More on paper? Tape or video record? Hold readings? Go to a
mountain top?

A: For starters, I can honestly say that I don't know what I think about
something until I've tried to write my way through it. And that's true
of these shows. While a ton of great stuff comes out of rehearsal, and
new jokes get found on the stage, I'm am fundamentally a writer. I don't
know any other way.When I'm about to start a show, I tell Steve [Kleinedler, the director], and I give him a date
to expect a draft. Then I tweet it or put it on Facebook or something.
When sit down to write, it's with that topic I'm struggling with,
something that is fascinating and current, that allows me to be critical
and self-critical, and that's broad enough to hook a lot of stories to.
By the time I know "this is the one" I've already got one or two
elements that I know are at the core of it, and I start with them, just
writing without agenda. I write TERRIBLE first drafts. They're humorless
rants with barely relevant anecdotes hooked onto them. But I beat that
draft into a better shape, and then send it to Steve, who is the only
person who sees those terrible drafts. And he gives me constructive
advice. A lot of fundamental questions. He'll notice rhetorical patterns
in the draft that I hadn't caught. We don't even read that one aloud,
because it lacks anything like the cadence or humor I want to bring to
the stage. I wait a couple weeks, and then go back to it with a fresh
mind. The second draft is a gutting of that original. With Dumber Faster,
I'd bet I deleted over half of it entirely, and the stuff that got cut
wasn't without value, it just didn't fit around the new center of the
show, which I think I've identified. Each subsequent draft for awhile
moves that center, ties the pieces around it tighter, introduces new
complexities and tries to resolve them. By draft seven or eight, Steve
and I are reading weekly, and we then usually bring in a cold reader to
read it to us. Then I gut it again, and build it up again. The stage
version of Dumber Faster was 17. Between 7 and 17, we had one
staged reading (draft 12). It's painful cutting scenes and jokes I like,
but I've never looked back at an old draft and thought it was better. I
know this process works for me.

Q: Who are some of your influences or people that inspire/embolden you?A: Novelists and essayists. I'm rereading Myla Goldberg's Bee Season right
now. That book is kicking my ass. The depth of the characters is
incredible, and she has these little scenes that are seismic. A brother
and sister sitting on a couch not talking. If I wrote that scene, it
would be that last sentence, that sentence fragment. Hers is an atom
bomb. Halfway through Dumber Faster,
I started watching the British comic Stewart Lee. I watched what I
could online and then bought everything I could of his from a record
company in Wales, and while I don't think our styles are anything alike,
your word "embolden" is completely apt. Everything I was just about to say, I now had to say. His shows are incredible. Q: How do you bridge the gap of the business side of theatre?

A: Oh
man. I guess I bridge it by falling into the ravine. I have this dream
of ending up in the black someday, but I'm a 9-to-5er. I'm fortunate to
have made a career that is interesting and ethical with a company that
gives me the flexibility to keep doing theater and comedy. I guess
because I came to it slowly and without a plan, I've remained shocked
that I get to do this at all, and so the fact that I'm woefully
negligent in looking after my own business interests doesn't keep me up
at night.

Q: Any advice for some aspiring artist just starting out in solo performance?

A: Two
things come to mind: be ruthlessly honest with yourself and find a
director or an advisor who will do the same. Most people will not tell you
the truth, they will tell you what is easiest to say that will encourage
you. Encouragement is valuable, but it doesn't push you to make good
theater or comedy. Look at your own material the way you'd look at the
work of a rival. Pick it apart. Write a scathing review of it in your
mind. When you revise, when you rehearse, address those problems.
Because you're not the only one who will think of them. You're just the
only one who can do anything about them before it's too late.The other thing I'd say is, if you're dealing with true stories, you
don't have to tell every detail. Just because it's true doesn't mean
it's theater. Pick the elements that make for good theater, and save the
rest. If you stopped for lunch between the two critical events, you're
not morally obligated to reveal the lunch. Your first obligation is to
captivate, entertain, and challenge the audience. You can do that,
ethically, without presenting a diary.

Q:Share with us something funny that has happened to you recently.

A: I
have a sort of compulsive personality, and on a lark, I started writing
fictional biographies of my friends on Facebook. It turned out to be a
good writing exercise, and really fun, and one thing led to another, and
six weeks later, I'd written 100 of them. I hadn't really intended to
take on a new project like that at all, but because I'm an idiot with no
time management skills, I wrote about 50,000 words of biography in less
than two months, putting aside almost everything else. The response has
been really positive, so I put them all on a site: Unauthorized Facebook Biography.

Q: What do you see for the future of solo performance and for you personally as an artist?

A: More
generally, I think everybody's ability to see anything and learn
anything at any time will expose more people to solo performance and
lead to a lot of technical innovation. We'll see a lot of spectacular
weirdness. While it's harder than ever to do anything at a huge level, I
see increasing opportunities to find rewarding and valuable communities
in niches. Nothing has to be a hit to be viable. That's my hope. Personally, I'm starting another show. I've identified the topic I
can't shake, so I'm just about to set a deadline and get to work. First
though, I'm retiring Dumber Faster in
grand style. The details are still getting worked out, but in March
we're going to run it as a charity show for an awesome organization that
still needs me to sign some paperwork before I should use their name
publicly. We're going to record it and make it available for download
for a $5 charitable contribution. I'm not seeing a penny from it. I
should have details public in January 2013!

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